There are plenty of blogs out there with this headline, or something similar, tacked on top. Most of them commence with dissections of General Motors’ bloated budget, taking side bets on bankruptcy proceedings, or blasting the Americans who bought GM’s giant cars as the real scapegoats. GM is in the news a lot lately– after all, they just had the auto show in Detroit a few months ago, and there’s that pesky extended bailout keeping them in the headlines.
Despite all this media attention, I have yet to read these words: “Wow. These guys are completely out of touch with reality, and they have terrible ideas.” So let me illuminate for you what the geniuses over at General Motors are using your tax dollars for.
At the North American International Auto Show in January,General Motors had a sweet trick up the sleeve of their collective lab coat– a state-of-the-art solution to the drag caused by sideview mirrors. Those little glass discs mounted on your I-beams are costing you fuel and slowing you down! The solution? Replace them with tiny cameras, mounted on the sides of the vehicle. These cameras will transmit a real-time image of what’s going on behind your car straight to little screens on your dash.
In one stroke of design genius, Ed Welburn– GM’s VP of global design– has taken a feature that is difficult to break barring a physical accident, is more or less essential to safe vehicle operation, and (most importantly) works simply, and has actually spent time and money developing a replacement for said feature that is unreliable, potentially buggy, and unnecessarily complicated. And need I even point out that the screens, wiring, and hardware for this little gadget probably clock in over 100 lbs? Plus, it’ll require energy, generated from your gas-powered engine, to operate. I’d imagine that gain in fuel efficiency is negated by the added weight and energy drain of these little gems.
This is before I even ask: Seriously? This is the company that builds the H2, and this is their approach to improving fuel economy? Tiny cameras? You make cars that get 8 miles to the gallon and you want to talk about fuel economy? Really?
Let’s give them some credit though– GM is thinking outside the box. They’re “collaborating” and coming up with radical new solutions to existing problems! That’s what Toyota does– GM can come up with new ideas, too! Like the PUMA! (That’s Personal Urban Mobility & Accessibility unit to you.) Check it out: Partnering with the increasingly obsolete Segway company, they’ve figured out a way to build a small, two-wheeled gadget capable of carrying people and a few parcels around town! According to NPR, they’re hoping that municipalities will designate smaller lanes next to major roads just for these innovative little gadgets. Genius!
Portland, Oregon, I can see you rolling your eyes. It’s called a bicycle– you have them all over. Look, it’s a nice little idea in some ways. But once again, completely out of touch with reality. It looks like a less-functional, more-dangerous version of the SmartCar– and it would require municipalities to dramatically change how they manage traffic instead of working within the existing frame.
All this amounts to reinventing the wheel, over and over again, but making it square. It’s like trying to bail out a sinking cruise ship with a Dixie cup. General Motors, please go the way of the dinosaurs (except don’t, for the love of all that is sacred, do anything remotely linked to oil…). They’ve gotta go before they have another chance to think or build things.
One thing we should toss out: Marie Arana’s rant April 20, 2009
Tags: commentary, editorial, fiction, literature, Marie Arana, Nobel, Nobel Prize, Salman Rushdie, Washington Post
This weekend, Marie Arana wrote an editorial for the Washington Post detailing how the Nobel Prize in Literature is decided by a bunch of anti-American meanies and we should get rid of it. I don’t have a problem, necessarily, with her thesis, but her reasoning is so shallow and strange that I had to draft a response:
Marie Arana’s derisive depiction of the Nobel Prize in Literature in the Post’s feature “10 Things We Should Toss” was such a thinly cloaked move towards inserting politics where there are none that I’m surprised you ran it. To read an argument that several of the Academy’s selections are out of touch with modern literature would be interesting; however, Arana’s editorial concludes that we should dismiss the Nobel Prize in Literature because a) the academy is snobby towards Americans and b) they have failed to recognize several great authors.
While compelling works such as Lolita stand out among their peers, they do not confer the sense of “idealism” the literature prize seeks to reward. The prize is awarded to those whose body of work, and specific work during the year of their award, conveys a sense of idealism– not excellence alone. Books are not rewarded solely for their literary merit; they’re rewarded for meeting Nobel criteria. These are not left-wing or right-wing beliefs. They don’t even register on the conventional American political spectrum. This editorial is the literary equivalent of demanding that a popular snack be re-named Freedom Fries.
Additionally, the Academy is under no mandate to be kind towards American attempts; take a look at the NYT bestsellers list and you will see little American proclivity towards literary fiction. Suggesting the elimination of a worldwide literary prize because an Academy member was snide towards Americans is the very type of provincial hubris that frustrates much of the rest of the world.
Selecting a few controversial choices for commentary and deigning the Prize irrelevant because of those choices is also disingenuous. I would say that I found it disappointing that Salman Rushdie was not recognized, but recognizing him would certainly be providing a reward to someone who meets the Nobel criteria and whose cause could be construed as “liberal”– so I have no doubt she is pleased about his exclusion. Marie Arana failed to mention whether J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, or Toni Morrison fall within her 15 deserving laureates, but I would be shocked to hear otherwise. If Arana wishes to argue against the Nobel Prize again, I hope she will choose meaningful criteria for her critique, and will provide an example of a worldwide literary prize that does a better job.
…Thoughts?